Japanese site Watch Impress has benchmarked and reviewed the Intel Tualatin-S Pentium III at 1.13GHz. The chip is the “S,” or server, version which features 512K of L2 cache, up over the 256K in the desktop version already reviewed by Tom's Hardware. Benchmarks compare the 1.13GHz cache-heavy chip with a 1GHz Pentium III and a variety of Athlons and Pentium 4 chips. For gaming and 3D performance, the new Pentium III isn't able to keep up. However, using Bapco's office productivity benchmarks, the 1.13GHz Tualatin-S beats out a 1.7GHz P4 (!!) and a 1.13GHz Athlon. In the Internet content creation suite (which I'm guessing benefits heavily from SSE), the Tualatin-S beats out a 1.4GHz P4 and a 1.33GHz Athlon. The only real problem with the Tualatin-S is that it's saddled with a 133MHz system bus, while the Athlon zooms along at 266MHz and the P4 is at 400MHz. This would most probably cause the 3D slowdown. Even when mated with DDR, Intel's Tualatin-S isn't equipped to handle bus speeds over 133MHz without overclocking, which may cause instability. Although the results are impressive, it's time to move on. Speaking of 3D, VoodooExtreme asked a bunch of game developers about the use of 3DNow! and SSE extensions in their games. Most don't use them at all, and a few are quite clueless regarding Intel vs. AMD. All in all, it's an interesting read.

USER COMMENTS 4 comment(s)

It could be better.(4:34am EST Tue Jul 10 2001)Supposing if they increase the L2 to 2MB like PIII Xeon, or just increase the bus(is it possible?), then it is very fine. But the perfect choice is to have a P4 with a large cache for desktop – until Intel's 0.13 move in three months. - by baboon hijacker

Hmm(11:28am EST Tue Jul 10 2001)How about posting a site that is in english so we can make some half decent comments about the Tualatin overclocking. - by Yuppers

Maybe they figured(12:57pm EST Tue Jul 10 2001)most people just look at the pictures? - by eldou

Site in English(1:39pm EST Tue Jul 10 2001)So far, the only information available on the Tualatin-S is on a Japanese site. They always seem to have chips before the US sites do. When Tom's Hardware or Anandtech does a Tualatin-S review, I'll be sure to link to it. - by RobGeek